ZGBJAM 2

The ZGBJAM 2 was hold during the weekend August 26t-28th, 2019. This is the second edition of our mini-jam focused on the creation of games for the Game Boy and specifically using ZGB. We'll be happy if more people were to join us (actually someone did!) but in the meantime this mini-jam has become a great excuse to share a good weekend with some friends and we even created a few games in the meantime!

A total of 8 entries were submitted even with the absence of Tatos and Deebrol who made some fantastic games the past year

Espeto Blast! by sergeeo Collect the falling sardines and throw your espetos into the pipes (some kind of internal joke, but it is a fun game anyways :P) As usual the music is awesome

El topo y los pájaros by David Erosa The title is in spanish meaning "The mole and the birds". You are a mole, so throw carrots to the birds to avoid them getting into your lair

Guardian Ghost by Maikel Ortego A game with randomly generated dungeons and using colors for the GameBoy Color Probably the most ambitious game of the jam and the one that helped me fix a couple of memory bugs in the engine

Hungry Birds by Joshua Frisby This one was a big surprise because it was made by someone from internet. The mechanic is simple, you make 3 birds jump with three different buttons and you need to get the food and avoid the rocks. It has music!

Hungry Monster by Raúl Vaquero Get the food and avoid the rest of falling objects with some cool animations

Feed the Kaiju by Zal0 (me!) and abishai This was my entry! Drop the claw, get the chicken and feed the kaiju! I did this game joining forces with Emilio becuase the past year I realize I needed some extra help if I wanted to make something decent

Muffin the alpaca by Fronze Run across the infinite Alpaca's Valley and get all the apples you can

Soviet Snake by Daniel Márquez If you like good music this is the game for you. Ah, and it also has a snake game on it!

Although things have changed a little bit in the past years with more and more games being created for the old handheld (specially since the release of GB Studio) I still think there is room for ZGB. In my opinion both engines are targetted to different groups of developers with GBStudio more focused on artists with no knowledge of programming at all and ZGB being more targeted to (high level) coders. There is even a third group of developers who love asm and squeezing the machine. I think there is room for all of us out there

I have a big list of features to implement but since the first ZGBJAM I have been specially working on making stuff easier to use in general. Here is the list of things I have been worwing on during the past weeks:

• since both GBTD and GBMB don't support input arguments people were forced to manually export and save after making any change. Also the exported info is not good enought since they only give you access to sprites and map data but you cannot get the height, width, bank and other interesting parameters forcing users to declare all these fields in their code (and having a lot of issues when changing one of them). Thanks to the good documentation of the file format (found here) I was able to create my own exporter finally getting rid of all these limitations. I'd like to create my own editors one day but in the meantime this solution is good enough
• I have added a modified version of pngb to the pipeline meaning you can finally import pngs and use them for splash screens without requiring the help of external tools
• A few bugs were fixed and specially a few of them related to memory management (I had the 2nd OAM buffer declared in the middle of the RAM) and collisions (I am sure there are still a few stupid decisions in the code because of how the old SDCC forced me to do things)
• All the tutorials have been reviewed and updated with the new workflow

I wish I had more time to dedicate to this project but I hope you understand that this is kind of my side-side-project and that when I started it I never expected it to become what it is today. I hope soon I can publish a little bit of what I've been working on all these years.

I finished the ZGBJAM first edition post asking if there will ever be a second edition of this jam. I'm happy it actually happened. Will there be a 3rd one? Please, make it happen!